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Paper Prototype – Question

December 1, 2008 — zyadda

The question I was most interested in exploring was whether people would be most likely to create a log in name if they didn’t already have one and whether the prompt to sign in would become annoying and discourage the users. Our team has created the shuffler in such a way that it suggests to people that they should create an account if they don’t have one and to log in if they already have an account. We did this by having the video shuffler provide more options when a user is logged in vs. when they are not logged in. We also made it so that every three video plays a message appears prompting the user to log in for more options, create an account, or cancel to continue watching videos.

When my roommate assisted me in doing the paper prototype my initial assumptions proved mostly correct. I had assumed that the users would most likely get annoyed being prompted to register after 3 consecutive video plays. My roommate explained to me that he decided to create an account and be able to log in prior to watching videos. He said if he didn’t create an account he would become very frustrated with being prompted to register. He explained that if he kept getting prompted he would either only use the shuffler for three videos then quit or he would seek another videos shuffler site. He also created an account so he had access to personal features that weren’t available on the quick use. Overall, it seems that our ideas to prompt users to register at the start of use and to not provide all features to the quick use shuffler were good ideas. However, we may want to rethink prompting the user every three videos. This may discourage users and shy them away from our feature.